Pharmaceutical and health products companies continued to dominate the lobbying space in the second quarter of 2025, spending $105.4 million to influence public policy. That industry has spent more on lobbying than any other, during every quarter but one, since 2010, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of disclosure reports.
That total was down from the industry’s first-quarter total ($121.4 million) but still 38 percent more than the second biggest spender, the electronics industry.
Despite spending falling from the Q1 high, such lobbying totals far outpaced spending from any year prior — the drastic increase coinciding with President Donald Trump’s second term, with spending rising approximately $30 million from Q4 of 2024 to Q1 of 2025.
The pharmaceutical industry spent $22 million more in the first half of 2025 ($226.8 million) than it spent in the same period of the prior year, as the Trump administration and Republican-led Congress pushed through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which will have a major impact on pharmaceutical companies.
Other industries that anticipate financial implication from Trump’s policies, such as education, health services and the environment, have upped their expenditures dramatically this year. For example, renewable energy lobbying jumped to $21.7 million in the second quarter of 2025 from $16.2 million Q2 of 2024 and $19.1 million in the first quarter of this year.
By the end of the year companies dealing with defense, federal appropriations, homeland security, Medicare and Medicaid, and taxes may spend record amounts on lobbying, with Q1 and Q2 numbers from this year already climbing past the 2024 totals. Each of those issue areas was affected by the OBBA, which poured billions of dollars into immigration control, made significant changes to health-related services like Medicaid, cut funding for green initiatives and extended tax cuts.
Other highlights
Top lobbying firms: Ballard Partners rose up the ranks to become the top lobbying firm of the second quarter, raking in $20 million. The firm, which is led by a top Trump fundraiser, earned $13.9 million in Q1 to lobby on mainly trade, government and health issues — jumping from the firm’s $4.3 million in Q1 of 2024. Both White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Attorney General Pam Bondi worked for Ballard before joining the administration, although that relationship hit some speed bumps earlier this year.
The previous quarter’s top firm — Brownstein, Hyatt — remains among the most active, earning $18.5 million for lobbying in Q2.
Top clients: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent the most on lobbying in Q2, at $19.8 million, up just $10,000 from the quarter prior. The National Association of Realtors spent the second highest amount on lobbying, funneling $16.2 million into legislation affecting housing affordability, disaster relief programs and other issues.
Biggest issue: The primary issue addressed in Q2 of 2025 was the federal budget and appropriations, which saw 4,396 organizations deploying lobbyists on the issue. In comparison, throughout all quarters in 2024, federal budget and appropriations saw 4,526 clients. The second largest issue in the second quarter — taxes — involved 2,118 clients, less than half the number working the spending issue.
Biggest legislation: The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by Trump on July 4, precipitated a windfall of lobbying spending, both for and against the legislation’s passage. The Trump administration’s sweeping, almost-1,000-page bill was, by far, the most actively lobbied legislation of the quarter with 2,145 clients working the legislation. Blue Cross/Blue Shield was the most active organization, followed by the American Hospital Association.
The OBBBA added more than $150 billion to military spending and approximately $70 billion towards border wall construction, immigration detention centers, Immigration and Custom Enforcement hiring initiatives and technologies to monitor immigration. Another $75 billion was allocated to support ICE deportation programs. It will add trillions of dollars to the debt, despite cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP and environmental programs.
Biggest increases: The real estate industry increased its lobbying spending the most in the second quarter, in terms of raw dollars. It spent $34.1 million on lobbying in April-June, up $6 million from the first three months.
As a percentage of spending, the biggest increase came among organizations trying to influence abortion policy, with spending jumping 186 percent in the second quarter, to $827,000. Lobbying on abortion issues shot up to $702,000 after Trump won re-election in 2024.
UnitedHealth Group increased its lobbying activity to $3.7 million in Q2, up from $1.5 million in Q2 of 2024. America’s Health Insurance Plans also grew its lobbying expenditures from $2.4 million to $4.1 million in the same period.
The American Clean Power Association spent $630,000 on lobbying in Q2 of 2024 with such expenditures remaining stable until last quarter, when they jumped to $3.8 million. Environmental groups such as the Nature Conservancy bumped up their lobbying efforts from $840,000 in Q2 of 2024 to $2.3 million this quarter, and jumping 230 percent from Q1 of 2025. Such increases reflect the industry-wide effort to fortify sustainability-focused legislation, which has been heavily rolled back by Congress and the Trump administration.
Pharma Industry and Ballard Partners Dominate the Lobbying Space in Second Quarter of 2025 was originally published by Open Secrets and is republished with permission.
Natalie Jonas is a freelance investigative journalist.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.